6 - Chiasmus in Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Summary

MY STUDENTS WERE often amused to learn that Henry David Thoreau had switched the order of his first and second names—he had been born David Henry Thoreau. I think the students enjoyed the simple early suggestion of defiance. However, one adult student, a mother, was not amused—she wrote about him with his original name, out of respect for his parents. My mentioning the name change was a lively way to begin classroom discussion—and it led to an important point: inversion was a critical literary technique of the writer Thoreau. Indeed, in Walden, a work renowned for its fine patterning, the deft use of chiastic inversion is one more measure of Henry David Thoreau's artistry. Chiasmus is varied in its resonance in Walden—sometimes it conveys defiance, sometimes balance. And the critical central chiasmus of the work furnishes the ultimate balance— and a vital allusion, as well.

“And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him,” Thoreau states in “Economy.” Providing another reversal of our common understanding of owned and owning, he makes a similar point about livestock later in the same chapter: “I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men” (56). Pursuing his aesthetic of antithesis once more in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau quips, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (92).

Other instances of chiastic reversal in Walden underscore Thoreau's claim to authority, his view of the individual's primacy over society:

• I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. [“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” 81]

• It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me. [“The Village,” 171, concerning Thoreau's imprisonment]

• It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. [“Spring,” 317, describing the soaring nighthawk]

Here, as elsewhere, Thoreau uses chiastic reversal to celebrate the unencumbered individual as he sets himself apart from society.